We now note that that we do not waive our attribution requirements for Spritely Goblins, which are present in Apache v2 (and for that matter, CC BY, CC BY-SA, and most FOSS licenses) https://codeberg.org/spritely/goblins/pulls/998/files
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I feel somewhat different about the whole issue, and I want to underline something:
Permissive licenses are about developer freedom, but copyleft licenses are about user freedom. I care about user freedom more than developer freedom.
Another angle is, if I create a tool/library and I share it for free, it's GPLv3. User freedom is non-negotiable plus, I don't want my free work to be sold to anyone. It's created to be free as in beer and as in speech.
I don't allow otherwise.
@bayindirh yes, I am one of the people who popularized "user freedom" as a term, partly in my talks about copyleft.
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Btw I have heard at least one prominent FOSS person (I'm choosing to not fill their notifications here by identifying them) that nobody cares about attribution requirements (and particularly not enforcing them). But to me, attribution is what I care about MORE than any other licensing requirements, more than copyleft "share-alike" style provisions, etc.
If you feel similarly, it would be good to hear on this thread. Perhaps even copying a similar notice into your project is a good idea.
@cwebber +1 to all of the above. Attribution is just so cheap to do, it's a red flag when it's too much effort for somebody.
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@bayindirh yes, I am one of the people who popularized "user freedom" as a term, partly in my talks about copyleft.
@cwebber Kudos to you. I don't remember where I read it first, but I write it everywhere the discussion permits.
From my understanding many FOSS developers don't understand how GPL/copyleft works, and as a result they are afraid of it.
Many developers don't care as well, and love MIT because it's "carefree".
Every license has its place, but there shall be more GPL software IMHO.
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Btw I have heard at least one prominent FOSS person (I'm choosing to not fill their notifications here by identifying them) that nobody cares about attribution requirements (and particularly not enforcing them). But to me, attribution is what I care about MORE than any other licensing requirements, more than copyleft "share-alike" style provisions, etc.
If you feel similarly, it would be good to hear on this thread. Perhaps even copying a similar notice into your project is a good idea.
I have a project repository that started out as a fork and eventually morphed into a project that was reworked into something beyond the original scope to become something new.
I still have attributions to the original author and posted the links to the previously forked repository. It was the spark, after all, and it is just as relevant in the timeline as it was when it was the origin.
Given that the project is a list (in this case, a blocklist), it can't really be copyrighted.
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Btw I have heard at least one prominent FOSS person (I'm choosing to not fill their notifications here by identifying them) that nobody cares about attribution requirements (and particularly not enforcing them). But to me, attribution is what I care about MORE than any other licensing requirements, more than copyleft "share-alike" style provisions, etc.
If you feel similarly, it would be good to hear on this thread. Perhaps even copying a similar notice into your project is a good idea.
@cwebber My history is in both academic computer science and physics, and in both fields attribution is *paramount*. Reviewers will, correctly, hold papers back from publication if work isn't cited properly, especially if it's the reviewer's own work
Of course in practice some things things slip by, work is stolen between peers and between professors and students all the time, but the intention is understood and important.
This inability to cite is perhaps the first thing that bothered me about LLMs. Code isn't cited, books and articles aren't cited, websites and blogs aren't cited (in addition to stealing meaningful traffic from them while paradoxically hammering them with scraping requests). It all goes to these companies' fundamental business model, which of course boils down to capitalism's standard procedure - steal the commons, then sell it back to us.
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@ilia These clauses already exist in prominent, and previously enforced, licenses. We didn't add anything, just called attention to the clauses.
(And yes, I have done a substantial amount of work on FOSS licensing issues.)
@cwebber ah, good to know, thanks for clarifying IANAL n'all that...
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@fnohe @xinniw @cwebber in my experience most copyright reform suggestions that seek to enlargen the space for remixing also seek to ensurine some form of attribution requirement into law.
i even saw a suggestion that every song should have dozens or even hundreds of people in the writing credits, because even when not directly remixing they suggested there should be a culture of "citing your sources" in music that works pretty much like academic citations for works that had any influence. -
Btw I have heard at least one prominent FOSS person (I'm choosing to not fill their notifications here by identifying them) that nobody cares about attribution requirements (and particularly not enforcing them). But to me, attribution is what I care about MORE than any other licensing requirements, more than copyleft "share-alike" style provisions, etc.
If you feel similarly, it would be good to hear on this thread. Perhaps even copying a similar notice into your project is a good idea.
@cwebber As a musician, attribution is often the only way people know where some random background music in their podcast/other production came from. I appreciate attribution very much indeed.
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Btw I have heard at least one prominent FOSS person (I'm choosing to not fill their notifications here by identifying them) that nobody cares about attribution requirements (and particularly not enforcing them). But to me, attribution is what I care about MORE than any other licensing requirements, more than copyleft "share-alike" style provisions, etc.
If you feel similarly, it would be good to hear on this thread. Perhaps even copying a similar notice into your project is a good idea.
@cwebber hard agree.
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@futzle Well, open source is in many ways a *reaction* to software becoming subject to copyright in 1980, whereas previously all software was in the public domain
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Btw I have heard at least one prominent FOSS person (I'm choosing to not fill their notifications here by identifying them) that nobody cares about attribution requirements (and particularly not enforcing them). But to me, attribution is what I care about MORE than any other licensing requirements, more than copyleft "share-alike" style provisions, etc.
If you feel similarly, it would be good to hear on this thread. Perhaps even copying a similar notice into your project is a good idea.
@cwebber from my academic /scientific background: attribution is critical of you want to build on a body of knowledge. You need to be able to find historic sources. Building on software source code is similar to building on previous scientific research in enough ways that citations are essential.
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Btw I have heard at least one prominent FOSS person (I'm choosing to not fill their notifications here by identifying them) that nobody cares about attribution requirements (and particularly not enforcing them). But to me, attribution is what I care about MORE than any other licensing requirements, more than copyleft "share-alike" style provisions, etc.
If you feel similarly, it would be good to hear on this thread. Perhaps even copying a similar notice into your project is a good idea.
@cwebber
Attribution is the most important thing. -
Btw I have heard at least one prominent FOSS person (I'm choosing to not fill their notifications here by identifying them) that nobody cares about attribution requirements (and particularly not enforcing them). But to me, attribution is what I care about MORE than any other licensing requirements, more than copyleft "share-alike" style provisions, etc.
If you feel similarly, it would be good to hear on this thread. Perhaps even copying a similar notice into your project is a good idea.
@cwebber attribution is important for more than just courtesy: without attribution, you have no way of knowing if there are upstream changes including security fixes that should be ported downstream.
One of the cardinal sins (among several) of LLM-generated code in my view is that it's the opposite of DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself). LLMs are happy to reinvent the wheel over and over again, and they're structurally unable to learn from any mistakes that they make.
As far as licenses, I've added a (not well legally reviewed or tested) don't-train-on-this clause, but also some extra disclaimers:
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Btw I have heard at least one prominent FOSS person (I'm choosing to not fill their notifications here by identifying them) that nobody cares about attribution requirements (and particularly not enforcing them). But to me, attribution is what I care about MORE than any other licensing requirements, more than copyleft "share-alike" style provisions, etc.
If you feel similarly, it would be good to hear on this thread. Perhaps even copying a similar notice into your project is a good idea.
@cwebber Attribution's probably the most important part: it's how we can trace the history of programs because the Ladies of the Chips know programmers are pretty bad about recording our own history.
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Btw I have heard at least one prominent FOSS person (I'm choosing to not fill their notifications here by identifying them) that nobody cares about attribution requirements (and particularly not enforcing them). But to me, attribution is what I care about MORE than any other licensing requirements, more than copyleft "share-alike" style provisions, etc.
If you feel similarly, it would be good to hear on this thread. Perhaps even copying a similar notice into your project is a good idea.
@cwebber Yes, strong agree. I used to release things under various CC licenses, including code, because CC-BY covers the most important part well. It's foundational, practically (as a way of recognizing effort and tracing provenance) and morally, and what makes the LLMs giant plagiarism machines.
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@cwebber My history is in both academic computer science and physics, and in both fields attribution is *paramount*. Reviewers will, correctly, hold papers back from publication if work isn't cited properly, especially if it's the reviewer's own work
Of course in practice some things things slip by, work is stolen between peers and between professors and students all the time, but the intention is understood and important.
This inability to cite is perhaps the first thing that bothered me about LLMs. Code isn't cited, books and articles aren't cited, websites and blogs aren't cited (in addition to stealing meaningful traffic from them while paradoxically hammering them with scraping requests). It all goes to these companies' fundamental business model, which of course boils down to capitalism's standard procedure - steal the commons, then sell it back to us.
-
Btw I have heard at least one prominent FOSS person (I'm choosing to not fill their notifications here by identifying them) that nobody cares about attribution requirements (and particularly not enforcing them). But to me, attribution is what I care about MORE than any other licensing requirements, more than copyleft "share-alike" style provisions, etc.
If you feel similarly, it would be good to hear on this thread. Perhaps even copying a similar notice into your project is a good idea.
@cwebber i care about attribution as a social function, but i don't care about enforcing attribution via licensing
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Btw I have heard at least one prominent FOSS person (I'm choosing to not fill their notifications here by identifying them) that nobody cares about attribution requirements (and particularly not enforcing them). But to me, attribution is what I care about MORE than any other licensing requirements, more than copyleft "share-alike" style provisions, etc.
If you feel similarly, it would be good to hear on this thread. Perhaps even copying a similar notice into your project is a good idea.
@cwebber I care heavily about attribution because that's the way you trace back to who's responsible for a piece of code. You can't enforce any other requirements if you can't identify who the code came from, and you end up taking the heat for any problems.
And of course there's the good-manners part, which I prefer to be the important part because the above only matters if there's problems and I prefer there not to be problems.
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Btw I have heard at least one prominent FOSS person (I'm choosing to not fill their notifications here by identifying them) that nobody cares about attribution requirements (and particularly not enforcing them). But to me, attribution is what I care about MORE than any other licensing requirements, more than copyleft "share-alike" style provisions, etc.
If you feel similarly, it would be good to hear on this thread. Perhaps even copying a similar notice into your project is a good idea.
I'd say I mostly care about attribution for my own projects in the same manner that I care about copyleft. I want software to be an unmistakably social endeavour, and I think attribution is a piece of that goal in addition to copyleft. I weigh copyleft a little higher because it makes up more of the pieces of my ideals by number, but I think attribution is very important as well. It's important to see code in its social context.
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Btw I have heard at least one prominent FOSS person (I'm choosing to not fill their notifications here by identifying them) that nobody cares about attribution requirements (and particularly not enforcing them). But to me, attribution is what I care about MORE than any other licensing requirements, more than copyleft "share-alike" style provisions, etc.
If you feel similarly, it would be good to hear on this thread. Perhaps even copying a similar notice into your project is a good idea.
@cwebber I definitely think sharing credit for where I got an idea is super important! I do appreciate when I receive it, but definitely think I care more about making sure I give the proper credit.
